Guile & Emacs chat at emacs hackathon/bug-crush SF

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Heya everyone,

I was at the Emacs hackathon / bug crushing event and I gave a couple
demos that were Guile related, one showing off guile-emacs, and one
showing off Guix's Emacs integration.  So the good news is: the talk
went super, super well (on both, but especially guile-emacs), and
enthusiasm was high!  When I showed guile-emacs live, there were some
amazed expressions to see oh hey... this is *really* working!

I also had a conversation with John Wiegley, current maintainer of
emacs, and he said several things:

 - He thinks it would be *great* to have Emacs running on Scheme, a
   clear win, assuming it's integrated and runs fast and works well.

 - However, Guile would have to be able to make a promise: once Emacs
   ran on top of Guile, Emacs would have to be able to have say over
   anything that could end up changing actual semantics in Emacs
   (mainly, anything that would break Emacs user's source code).

   (I think there's an easy answer to this: guile-emacs is already
   aiming for heavy backwards compatibility and should just preserve
   that at this level.)

 - If we could prove that performance was better in guile-emacs, that's
   an easy way to win enthusiasm.

 - A good goal to work towards: all of emacs' tests should pass using
   guile-emacs.

So that's all a ways off, but I'm feeling enthusiastic that it's
possible!

 - Chris

PS: I'd like to see bipt's elisp branch merged with master.  I might try
to help... I'm trying to learn enough to do so.  However I don't have a
lot of time, and especially not a lot of experience with compilers..